Wayland 1.15 and the Weston 4.0 compositor had been planned for release in February but Wayland developers decided there was still enough material on the verge of landing that they decided to delay the release. A new release schedule has now been put forward for getting these updates out in April.

Derek Foreman of the Samsung OSG has stepped up to manage this revised Wayland 1.15 / Weston 4.0 release. Now that the "high priority" work has been merged, Derek is ready to move on with wrangling the release.

Last week marked the inaugural release of Xorgproto, a new package consisting of all the X.Org protocol headers rather than being in standalone packages now that X.Org Server development is slowing down and that many of these protocol headers wind up getting updated at the same time. Today marks the Xorgproto 2018.2 release.

Open-source AMD Linux driver developers have started off the week by posting 34 more patches for the "DC" display code stack that was mainlined in Linux 4.15 and further improved with Linux 4.16. With these latest patches that begin the queue for Linux 4.17 there are yet more AMDGPU DC improvements and in particular Raven Ridge fixes.

Following the release of the Linux 4.15 kernel with KPTI and Retpoline introduction, many Phoronix readers were interested in seeing a fresh Linux CPU performance comparison. For those reasons plus in preparing for the Raven Ridge testing, here are benchmarks of 19 different systems when using Ubuntu x86_64 with the Linux 4.15 stable kernel.

An assortment of 19 different systems from old to new and from low-end to high-end were tested, ranging from old AMD A10 Kaveri APUs to the high-end AMD EPYC 7601 server processor, with a similar breadth of CPUs tested on the Intel side. Again, these tests are mostly being done for reference purposes. And in the days ahead will be a larger low-end-focused CPU comparison for the upcoming Ryzen 3 2200G / Ryzen 5 2400G Linux benchmarking.

A decade ago Linux users were clamoring for Sun Microsystems to bring Solaris' DTrace and ZFS to Linux. While there are still petitions for Oracle to more liberally license ZFS so it could see mainline Linux support, it's been years since hearing much interest in DTrace for Linux. Over time other dynamic tracing implementations have come about and improved in comparison to DTrace, but for those still wanting this dynamic tracing framework that originated at Sun Microsystems, Oracle remains working on the Linux port.

It's been a while since Can't Drive This [Steam] gained Linux support, so I finally set aside some time to take a proper look. An amusing idea, where one player races and the other builds the track as you go.

In the past 24 hours, Security researcher Scott Helme discovered that a third party accessibility plugin called ‘Browsealoud’ had their servers compromised. The plugin relies on a website including Javascript in their content in order to work. This compromise resulted in over 4,000 websites serving up cryptomining malware.

As a French teacher, my best find was Verbiste, the offline French verb conjugation tool. As a cooking enthusiast, the Gourmet Recipe Manager was an adorable little perk.

And a must-do: download Wine, which runs Windows stuff on Linux.

Every piece of Microsoft software has a Linux doppelganger. I opened a text document and started typing, as usual... easy-peasy! The good part? The word count and character count appear automatically on the bottom left in the tiny bar at the base of the page, updating with each word I type. Confession: I’ve never liked Times New Roman, somehow. LibreOffice’s Century Schoolbook is much larger, clearer, and just so much more official-looking.

Coming later today is a large Intel/AMD CPU comparison using the latest Linux 4.15 stable kernel that is mitigated for Spectre and Meltdown and using around two dozen tests. For the high-end Xeon Gold and EPYC servers, I ran close to 200 tests on those platforms.

A few days back was the Core i9 vs. Threadripper tests with a similar quantity of Linux benchmarks being run while this morning are the numbers for the dual Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs versus the EPYC 7601, AMD's current top-end Zen server processor. These are the two highest-end server configurations I have available for testing at the moment. With the dual Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs it's a 40 core / 80 thread total while the single EPYC 7601 is 32 core / 64 thread, as a reminder.

Over the past few years, interest in civilian, military, and commercial drones has grown rapidly, which has also driven the maker community's interest in open source drone projects.

The list of unmanned aerial devices (UAVs) that fit the moniker of drone seems to be constantly expanding. These days, the term seems to encompass everything from what is essentially a cheap, multi-bladed toy helicopter, all the way up to custom-built soaring machines with incredibly adept artificial intelligence capabilities.

ZFS remains one of the most technically advanced and feature-complete filesystems since it appeared in October 2005. Code for Sun's original Zettabyte File System was released under the CDDL open-source license, and it has since become a standard component of FreeBSD and slowly migrated to various BSD brethren, while maintaining a strong hold over the descendants of OpenSolaris, including OpenIndiana and SmartOS.

Oracle is the owner and custodian of ZFS, and it's in a peculiar position with respect to Linux filesystems. Btrfs, the main challenger to ZFS, began development at Oracle, where it is a core component of Oracle Linux, despite stability issues Red Hat's recent decision to deprecate Btrfs likely introduces compatibility and support challenges for Oracle's Linux road map. Oracle obviously has deep familiarity with the Linux filesystem landscape, having recently released "dedup" patches for XFS. ZFS is the only filesystem option that is stable, protects your data, is proven to survive in most hostile environments and has a lengthy usage history with well understood strengths and weaknesses.

While Canonical already implemented hardware-accelerated video playback support for Intel CPUs in the current release of the operating system, Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), it would appear that plan on extending it to other types of processors, display servers, and video players.

In a recent call for testing, Canonical urges those who are already running the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system on their personal computers to test the video playback performance with apps like MPV or Totem (GNOME Videos), as well as the Wayland or Xorg display servers, and report any issues.

GraspIO’s “Cloudio” IoT prototyping add-on board for the Raspberry Pi includes a 1-inch OLED display, sensors, 6x I/Os, and a servo, and is controlled using a mobile/cloud-based drag-and-drop app with IFTTT and voice support.

Bangalore (Bengaluru), India based GraspIO (Grasp IO Innovations) has partnered with Premier Farnell to manufacturer and distribute its new Cloudio prototyping add-on board for the Raspberry Pi 1/2/3/0/0W. Available at Newark Element14 for $40 among other Farnell venues, the Cloudio showcases GraspIO’s IoT Cloud service and drag-and-drop Studio mobile development app, which runs on Android devices as well as the Apple iPhone and iPad.

Free Electrons changed its name to Bootlin, and funded a Kickstarter campaign to bring support for the Allwinner VPU to the Linux kernel, building upon earlier work done in collaboration with the Linux Sunxi community called sunxi-cedrus.

It’s been a long hard slog to improve Linux support on Allwinner’s ARM-based SoCs, and now a French development firm called Bootlin wants to plug in the last piece of the puzzle. Bootlin has successfully crowdfunded a project to upstream support for the Allwinner video processing unit (VPU) into the Linux kernel. Over $30,000 has been raised on Kickstarter — well over the $21,566 goal — and there are 37 days left to expand the project on its way to a completion goal of June.

​I have reviewed a very good Linux distribution that I first used full-time as opposed to just playing around with it 8 years ago. You could say that I was suckled on it so to speak. What attracted me to PCLinuxOS distribution was mainly how simple to use it was. They released a new ISO to download in November so I decided to give this release a go.

Since Mageia was born, FOSDEM has been a very important event for us. Six times we had a booth and our General Assembly during the event, we’ve always had a Mageia dinner and there were always more ways to enjoy meeting one another.

This blog post was almost not written, though, because until less than a week before FOSDEM, it was only sure of one council member, akien, that he’d be there. However, he’d mainly be there for another really nice project, the Godot Engine. Apart from that, our application for a stand was turned down (again).

Six days before FOSDEM, names started to get added to our FOSDEM 2018 Wiki page. One day later, it became certain that ennael would be at FOSDEM and on Wednesday, the number of council members who’d go increased from 2 to 4. It was only after that, that we tried to find volunteers to help organise various ways to meet one another in Brussels.

The GNOME Foundation advisory board meeting was happening on Friday the 2nd so I travelled to Brussels on Thursday. Years ago, there were two train routes from Strasbourg to Brussels: the direct one was using slow trains, through a large part of Belgium and Luxembourg, and took a bit more than 5 hours; the other one meant taking a TGV from Strasbourg to Paris (~2 hours), changing stations (5 minutes walk from Gare de l’Est to Gare du Nord) and taking a Thalys to Brussels (~2 hours). I was pleased to learn that there was now a direct TGV route. Even if the announced time of 3 hours and 50 minutes was only a tiny bit shorter than the indirect one, the confort of a journey with no connection adds real value. Of course I wasn’t expecting a direct route to go through the Charles de Gaulle airport train station, but well… still better than the alternative! This nice journey was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Foundation.

About 2.5 years ago I left Red Hat to join Linaro in a move that surprised even me for the first few months. I still work on the GNU toolchain with a glibc focus, but my focus changed considerably. I am no longer looking at the toolchain in its entirety (although I do that on my own time whenever I can, either as glibc release manager or reviewer); my focus is making glibc routines faster for one specific server microprocessor; no prizes for guessing which processor that is. I have read architecture manuals in the past to understand specific behaviours but this is the first time that I have had to pore through the entire manual and optimization guides and try and eek out the last cycle of performance from a chip.

One of my tasks at my new communications job is to re-activate and improve our social media channels. I've used Twitter and Facebook for many years, so that was easy. Now, I need to work on Instagram.

I've never really been into Instagram (or Pinterest), but I needed to learn and start Instagramming. I had a few pictures from a recent event, and I was all set to upload them onto Instagram from my Windows 10 desktop, but Instagram is a mobile-driven application. I couldn't find an upload button on the browser; I tried Chrome, Firefox, and Brave. Hmmm. OK. Let's try the Microsoft Store and install the handy app. Uh-oh, same problem.

There are tons of operating systems coming out all the time, from free laptop systems like EasyPeasy to Manjaro, Mandriva, and Kubuntu. But all of them have their share of kinks.

Naturally, many of us are scared of change, and not everyone is an early adopter when it comes to these kinds of things. While operating systems like MacOS and Chrome OS still claim larger market shares in 2018, it bears mentioning that newer operating systems have a lot to offer.

More in Tux Machines

Linux: To recurse or not

Linux and recursion are on very good speaking terms. In fact, a number of Linux command recurse without ever being asked while others have to be coaxed with just the right option. When is recursion most helpful and how can you use it to make your tasks easier? Let’s run through some useful examples and see.

today's leftovers

MX Linux Review of MX-17. MX-17 is a cooperative venture between the antiX and former MEPIS Linux communities. It’s XFCE based, lightning fast, comes with both 32 and 64-bit CPU support…and the tools. Oh man, the tools available in this distro are both reminders of Mepis past and current tech found in modern distros.

Samsung stopped the distribution of the Android 8.0 Oreo operating system update for its Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones due to unexpected reboots reported by several users.
SamMobile reported the other day that Samsung halted all Android 8.0 Oreo rollouts for its Galaxy S8/S8+ series of Android smartphones after approximately a week since the initial release. But only today Samsung published a statement to inform user why it stopped the rollouts, and the cause appears to be related to a limited number of cases of unexpected reboots after installing the update.

The Xen Project is comprised of a diverse set of member companies and contributors that are committed to the growth and success of the Xen Project Hypervisor. The Xen Project Hypervisor is a staple technology for server and cloud vendors, and is gaining traction in the embedded, security and automotive space. This blog series highlights the companies contributing to the changes and growth being made to the Xen Project and how the Xen Project technology bolsters their business.

A few days back I reported on Intel Icelake patches for the i965 Mesa driver in bringing up the OpenGL support now that several kernel patch series have been published for enabling these "Gen 11" graphics within the Direct Rendering Manager driver. This Icelake support has been quick to materialize even with Cannonlake hardware not yet being available.

Introduced as part of LunarG's recent Vulkan SDK update is the VLF, the Vulkan Layer Factory.
The Vulkan Layer Factory aims to creating Vulkan layers easier by taking care of a lot of the boilerplate code for dealing with the initialization, etc. This framework also provides for "interceptor objects" for overriding functions pre/post API calls for Vulkan entry points of interest.